This week the FreeSWITCH team added a built in bandwidth test to the verto communicator and a calculated RTT value to help with detecting congested network links. This week we have David Taht joining us on the ClueCon weekly call to talk about FCC firmware policies. Join us Wednesdays at 12:00 CT for some more FreeSWITCH fun! And head over to freeswitch.com to learn more about FreeSWITCH support.
New features that were added:
Improvements in build system, cross platform support, and packaging:
The following bugs were squashed:
The FreeSWITCH 1.4 branch had a bug fix added this week.
The following bugs were squashed:
The Accounts Manager App is a dynamic web portal providing multi-tenant functionality for worry-free scaling. Manage all of your accounts, and provide granular control to ensure customers have an enjoyable experience. Set limits for trunks, create call restrictions and manage credit balances – all within the App.
The Accounts Manager App has consolidated customer relationship management within a single User Interface. Accounts can be set up remotely, enabling you to sell across the continental United States. You no longer need to worry about logging into separate systems or figure out what client is on which platform.
What Accounts Manager Provides
Unified and Intuitive Interface
Add and edit new accounts and sub-accounts, monitor customers, select a carrier strategy, maintain service plans and restrictions - in one interface.
Simplifying Account Set-Up
Set up accounts for all of your customers. Create business account names, add the admin contact or manage the account yourself.
Set Limits and Create Call Restrictions
Create and set limits for your customers that include inbound, outbound, and two-way trunks. Set up call restrictions based on tolls, location, Emergency Dispatcher, and manage your customer’s credit balance.
Manage Permissions
Manage what your clients can and can’t view. This includes user and account settings, billing options, inbound and outbound trunking, and UI errors.
A long, boring straight line.
In some ways, WebRTC now feels like a decade ago, when every time we said “next year will be the year of video”. For WebRTC? Next year will be the year of adoption.
Adoption is hard to define though. What does it really means when it comes to WebRTC?
WebRTC has been picked up by carriers (AT&T, Comcast and others if you care about name dropping), most (all?) video conferencing and unified communication vendors, education, banking and healthcare industries, contact centers.
While all is well in the world of WebRTC, there is no hype. A year and a half ago I wrote about it – the fact that there is no hype in WebRTC. It still holds true. Too true. And too steadily.
The chart below is a collection of 2 years of data of some of the data points I follow with WebRTC. I hand picked here 4 of them:
In all of these cases (as well as other metrics I collect and follow), the trend is very stable. There’s growth, but that growth is linear in nature.
There are two minor areas worth mentioning:
Some believe that the addition of Microsoft Edge will change the picture. Statistics of Edge adoption and the statistics I’ve collected in the past two months show no such signs. If anything, I believe most still ignore Microsoft Edge.
Where does that put us?Don’t be discouraged. This situation isn’t really bad. 2015 has been a great year for WebRTC. We’ve seen public announcements coming from larger vendors (call it adoption) as well as the addition of Microsoft into this game.
Will 2016 be any different? Will it be the breakout year? The year of WebRTC?
I doubt it. And not because WebRTC won’t happen. It already is. We just don’t talk that much about it.
If you are a developer, all this should be great news for you – there aren’t many others in this space yet, so demand versus supply of experienced WebRTC developers favors developers at the moment – go hone your skill. Make yourself more valuable to potential employers.
If you are a vendor, then find the most experienced team you can and hold on to them – they are your main advantage in the next years when it comes to outperforming your competitors when it comes to building a solid service.
We’re not in a hyped up industry as Internet of Things or Big Data – but we sure make great experiences.
The post WebRTC Demand isn’t Exponentially Growing appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
There’s a new home for the WebRTC Data Channel – it found its use lately in context.
Ever since WebRTC was announced, I’ve been watching the data channel closely – looking to see what developers end up doing with it. There are many interesting use cases out there, but for the most part, it is still early days to decide where this is headed. In the last couple of weeks though, I’ve seen more and more evidence that there’s one place where the WebRTC Data Channel is being used – a lot more than I’d expect. That place is in adding context to a voice or video call.
Where did my skepticism come from?
Look at this diagram, depicting a simplified contact center using WebRTC:
We have a customer interacting with an agent, and there are almost always two servers involved:
The logic here is that the connection to the web server should suffice to provide context – why go through all the trouble of opening up a data channel here? For some reason though, I’ve seen evidence that many are adopting the data channel to pass context in such scenarios – and they are terminating it in their server side and not passing it direct between the browsers.
The question then is why? Why invest in yet another connection?
#1 – LatencyIf you do need to go from browser to browser, then why make the additional leg through the signaling server?
Going direct reduces the latency, and while it might not be much of an issue, there are use cases when this is going to be important. When the type of context we are passing is collaboration related, such as sharing mouse movements or whiteboarding activity – then we would like to have it shared as soon as possible.
#2 – FirewallsWe might not want to go through the signaling server for the type of data we wish to share as context. If this is the case, then the need to muck around with yet another separate server to handle a Websocket connection might be somewhat tedious and out of context. Having the WebRTC data channel part of the peer connection object, created and torn down at the same time can be easier to manage.
It also has built in NAT and Firewall traversal mechanisms in place, so if the call passes – so will the context – no need to engineer, configure and test another system for it.
#3 – AsymmetryAt times, not both sides of the session are going to use WebRTC. The agent may as well sit on a PSTN phone looking at the CRM screen on his monitor, or have the session gateway into a SIP network, where the call is received.
In such cases, the media server will be a gateway – a device that translates signaling and media from one end to the other, bridging the two worlds. If we break that apart and place our context in a separate Websocket, then we have one more server to handle and one more protocol to gateway and translate. Doing it all in the gateway that already handles the translation of the media makes more sense for many use cases.
#4 – Load ManagementThat web server doing signaling? You need it to manage all sessions in the system. It probably holds all text chats, active calls, incoming calls waiting in the IVR queue, etc.
If the context we have to pass is just some log in information and a URL, then this is a non-issue. But what if we need to pass things like screenshots, images or files? These eat up bandwidth and clog a server that needs to deal with other things. Trying to scale and load balance servers with workloads that aren’t uniform is harder than scaling uniform work loads.
#5 – Because We CanLet’s face it – WebRTC is a new toy. And the data channel in WebRTC is our new shiny object. Why not use it? Developers like shiny new toys…
The Humble WebRTC Data ChannelThe data channel has been around as long as WebRTC, but it hasn’t got the same love and attention. There’s very little done with it today. This new home it found with passing context of sessions is an interesting development.
Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.
The post WebRTC Data Channel find a home in Context appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
This week the FreeSWITCH team added support for early media with a 180 to mod_sofia and continued the expansion of mod_hiredis limit functionality. This week we have Justin Grow from Flowroute joining us on the ClueCon weekly call. He will be talking about Flowroute APIs and configuring FreeSWITCH to work with Flowroute.
Join us Wednesdays at 12:00 CT for some more FreeSWITCH fun! And head over to freeswitch.com to learn more about FreeSWITCH support.
New features that were added:
The following bugs were squashed:
The FreeSWITCH 1.4 branch had a bug fix added this week.
The following bugs were squashed:
A few use cases where WebRTC can be found in gaming.
When WebRTC first came out, everyone were in frenzy trying to figure out which verticals will end up using WebRTC. One of the verticals that keeps popping up, but never sticking around for long is gaming.
When discussing WebRTC and gaming, there’s more than a single use case – there are a few dominant one; and I wanted to share them here this time.
#1 – Social GamesRemember Cube Slam? Google’s first demo of WebRTC, where you can play a game with someone else and see him on the other side?
That was a demo. Jocly Games is the best example I have. Jocly Games offer turn by turn board games where your opponent is another player somewhere. If you wish, you can see each other during the game by the help of WebRTC. I’ve interviewed Michel Gutierrez, the CEO of Jocly Games two years ago.
Roll20 does a similar thing for multiplayer RPG games.
#2 – Motion SensorWhile I haven’t seen any serious game using this, the fact that you can get a camera feed into a game means you can track movement. And if you can track movement – you can use it to control something.
How about a game of Snake?
#3 – Multiplayer GamingMultiplayer games require synchronization between players. The better the connection the more responsive the game. And where latency is important, there’s room for WebRTC’s data channel.
Two and a half years ago, Mozilla released a proof of concept of sorts. Its own WebRTC demo, focused on the data channel. It was a game called BananaBread. It is a first person shooter where the players communicate their positions and actions directly with each other using the data channel.
This year, I reviewed a book about multiplayer game development in HTML5. While the WebRTC part of it was skinny compared to the rest, it did mention its capability.
In the wild, I haven’t seen any evidence of this being used a lot. I assume it is due to the relative complexity of implementing it and taking care of cases where some players can’t use the data channel or must relay it via TURN servers.
#4 – Controller and DisplayThis is something I haven’t seen up until recently, and now I’ve seen it several times in the same month.
AirConsole uses this technique. To some extent, Ericsson’s Remote Excavation demo takes the same approach.
The idea is one device holds the controls over the other. In our case, a game controller and the PC/console running the game (on a browser of course). Once the two pair up using a WebRTC data channel, the latency involved in passing commands from the controller to the device are minimized.
What am I missing?4 different typical use cases. None used in any popular game. None considered “best practices” or common approaches to game development.
Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.
The post Is there any Room for WebRTC in Gaming? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
There has been more noise about WebRTC making it possible to track users. We have covered some of the nefarious uses of WebRTC and look out for it before. After reading a blog post on this topic covering some allegedly new unaddressed issues a week ago I decided to ignore it after some discussion on the mozilla IRC channel. But this has some up on a the twitter-sphere again and Tsahi said ‘ouch’, here are my thoughts.
ClaimsThe blog post (available here) makes a number of claims about how certain Chrome behavior makes fingerprinting easier:
First, there is a claim that the way Chrome caches certificates changed recently:
In the past, Google Chrome used to generate a new self-signed certificate for every WebRTC PeerConnection. But now (using Chrome 46, or maybe earlier as i did not check) it generates a self-signed certificate which is valid for one month and uses it for all PeerConnections of a particular domain.
The code used to demonstrate this behaviour is rather odd, too. It uses the getStats API to the query the fingerprint, which is also available more easily in the SDP.
Chrome has cached certificates in this way for about two years, this is not real news. One of the reasons for this is that it is rather expensive to generate the current private keys for DTLS, especially on mobile devices. In the future, there will be more control over this behaviour. Neither Firefox nor Edge currently cache certificates.
To be fair, the WebRTC team made a serious blunder here. Until Chrome 45, the certificate was not cleared when cookies were cleared, only when all data was cleared. The bugfix for this only appeared in the Chrome 47 release notes:
Issue 510850 DTLS cert should be cleared when cookies are cleared
Cross-Origin TrackingSo this part is not really news. The second claim made in the blog post is that this enables cross-origin tracking:
To test this go to http://www.kapejod.org/tracking/test.html and to http://kapejod.org/tracking/test.html. Open the network tab of Chrome’s developer console and compare the urls of the requested “tracking.png”. They should contain the same fingerprint, now!
They do. Now, let’s look at this test page:
// make up some random id var transactionId = 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx'.replace(/[xy]/g, function(c) {var r = Math.random()*16|0,v=c=='x'?r:r&0x3|0x8;return v.toString(16);}); var fragment = document.createDocumentFragment(); var div = document.createElement("DIV"); div.innerHTML = '<iframe src="http://kapejod.org/tracking/identify.html?'+transactionId+'" width="1" height="1" style="display:none;"/>'; fragment.appendChild(div); document.body.insertBefore(fragment, document.body.childNodes[document.body.childNodes.length - 1]);It includes the URL http://kapejod.org/tracking/identify.html. Let’s also look at the code there as well. It executes the code shown above and logs the fingerprint to the console:
console.log('your fingerprint is: ' + fingerprint);Now why is the fingerprint the same? Well, the iframe is always included from kapejod.org. Which means the Javascript is executed within the context of this origin.
So Chrome can use the persisted fingerprint. As well as any cookies and localStorage data. The attack surface here is no worse than setting a cookie.
Another thing related to this (and I am surprised this has not yet been mentioned) are the deviceIds returned by navigator.mediaDevices.enumerateDevices. Those are also persisted with the same lifetime as cookies. The W3C mediacapture specification has a paragraph about security and privacy considerations on this:
The identifiers for the devices are designed to not be useful for a fingerprint that can track the user between origins, but the number of devices adds to the fingerprint surface. It recommends to treat the per-origin persistent identifier deviceId as other persistent storages (e.g. cookies) are treated.
Again, WebRTC and other HTML5 techniques increase the fingerprint surface. But by design, this is not worse than cookies or equivalent techniques like localStorage.
Incognito ModeLast but not least the blog post makes claims about the incognito mode:
But to make it generate a new one you have to close ALL incognito tabs. Otherwise you can be tracked across multiple domains.
Again, this behaviour is consistent with the incognito mode behaviour for things like localStorage. In both Chrome and Firefox. In incognito mode, open a site, set something in localStorage. Open another tab. Close first tab. Navigate to same site. Check localStorage. Boo!
tl;drThere is no real news here. In Germany, we call this ‘olle kamellen’.
{“author”: “Philipp Hancke“}
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The post OMG WebRTC is tracking me! Or is it? appeared first on webrtcHacks.
Announcing an upcoming free webinar on the challenges of WebRTC testing.
This week I took a trip to San Francisco, where the main goal was to attend WebRTC Summit and talk there about the challenges of WebRTC testing. This was part of the marketing effort we’re placing at testRTC. It is a company I co-founded with a few colleagues alongside my consulting business.
During the past year, we’ve gained a lot of interesting insights regarding the current state of testing in the WebRTC ecosystem. Which made for good presentation material. The session at the WebRTC Summit went rather well with a lot of positive feedback. One such comment made was this one that I received by email later during that day:
I liked much your presentation which indeed digs into one of the most relevant problems of WebRTC applications, which is not generally discussed in conferences.
My own favorite, is what you can see in the image I added above – many of the vendors our there just don’t make the effort to test their WebRTC implementations properly – not even when they go to production.
I’ve identified 5 main challenges that are facing WebRTC service developers:
The slides from my session are here below:
Overcoming the Challenges in Testing WebRTC Services from Tsahi Levent-levi
That said, two weeks from now, I will be hosting a webinar with the assistance of Amir Zmora on this same topic. While some of the content may change, most of it will still be there. If you are interested, be sure to join us online at no cost. To make things easier for you, there are two sessions, to fit any timezone.
When? Wednesday, November 18
Session 1: 8 AM GMT, 9 AM CET, 5 PM Tokyo
Session 2: 4 PM GMT, 11 AM EDT, 8 AM PDT
Test and Monitor your WebRTC Service like a pro - check out how testRTC can improve your service' stability and performance.
The post WebRTC Testing Challenges: An Upcoming Webinar and a Recent Session appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
I wonder. Can Apple maintain its lead without getting deep and dirty in analytics?
Apple decided to “take the higher ground”. It has pivoted this year focusing a lot around privacy. Not maintaining user keys for one, but also collecting little or no information from devices and doing as much as possible analytics on device. For now, it seems to be working.
But can it last?
Let’s head 5 or 10 years into the future.
Now lets look at Google and Facebook. Both have voracious appetite to data. Both are analytics driven to the extreme – they will analyze everything and anything possible to improve their service. Where improving it may mean increasing its stickiness, increasing ROI and ARPU, etc.
As time goes by, computing power increases, but also the technology and understanding we have at our disposal in sifting through and sorting out huge amounts of data. We call it Big Data and it is changing all the time. A year or two ago, most discussions on big data were around Hadoop and workloads. This year it was all about real time and Spark. There’s now a shift happening towards machine learning (as opposed to pure analytics), and from there, we will probably head towards artificial intelligence.
To get better at it, there are a few things that need to be in place as well as ingrained into a company’s culture:
These traits are already there for Google and Facebook. I am less certain regarding Apple.
Fast forward 5 to 10 years.
Where would that leave Apple?
If a smartphone (or whatever device we will have at that time) really becomes smart – would you pick out the shiny toy with the eye candy UI or the one that gets things done?
Can Apple stay long term with its stance towards data collection policies or will it have to end up collecting more data and analyzing it the way other companies do?
The post Can Apple’s On-Device Analytics Compete with Google and Facebook? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
FreeSWITCH got some neat improvements this week with work going into improving the handling of vw and vh core file parameters in mod_av to avoid video cropping and crashing, the addition of a new configuration setting in mod_opus to show the decoder stats at the end of the call, and exposing SRTP and SRTCP crypto keys as channel variables to help with debugging.
Join us Wednesdays at 12:00 CT for some more FreeSWITCH fun! And head over to freeswitch.com to learn more about FreeSWITCH support.
New features that were added:
Improvements in build system, cross platform support, and packaging:
The following bugs were squashed:
The FreeSWITCH 1.4 branch had a few bug fixes added this week.
The following bugs were squashed:
Someone should build a generic fallback…
If you don’t know Socket.io then here’s the gist of it:
It is also very popular – as a developer, it lets you assume a WebSocket like interface and develop on top of it; and it takes care of all the mess of answering the question “but what if my browser/proxy/whatever doesn’t support WebSocket?
I guess there are use cases where the WebRTC data channel is like that – you’d love to have the qualities it gives you, such as reduced server load and latency, but you can live without it if you must. It would be nice if we’d have a popular Socket.io-like interface to do just that – to attempt first to use WebRTC’s data channel, then fallback to either a TURN relay for it or to WebSocket (and degrading from there further along the line of older transport technologies).
The closest I’ve seen to it is what AirConsole is doing. They enable a smartphone to become the gamepad of a browser. You get a smartphone and your PC connected so that whatever you do in the phone can be used to control what’s on the PC. Such a thing requires low latency, especially for gaming purposes; and WebRTC probably is the most suitable solution. But WebRTC isn’t always available to us, so AirConsole just falls back to other mechanisms.
While a gaming console is an obvious use case, and I did see it in more instances lately, I think there’s merit to such a generic framework in other instances as well.
Time someone implemented it
The post Where’s the Socket.io of WebRTC’s Data Channel? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
Links:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/intro.html
Don’t wait up for Apple to get you WebRTC in the near future.
Like many others, I’ve seen the minor twitter storm of our minuscule world of WebRTC. The one in which a screenshot of an official Apple job description had the word WebRTC on it. Amir Zmora does a good job of outlining what’s ahead of Apple with adding WebRTC. The thing he forgot to mention is when should we be expecting anything.
The below are generally guesses of mine. They are the roadmap I’d put for Apple if I were the one calling the shots.
When will we see an Apple WebRTC implementation?Like anyone else, I am clueless to the inner workings of Apple. If the job postings tell us anything it is that Apple are just starting out. Based on my experience in implementations of media engines, the time it took Google, Mozilla and Microsoft to put a decent release out, I’d say:
We are at least 1 year away from a first, stable implementation
It takes time to implement WebRTC. And it needs to be done across a growing range of devices and hardware when it comes to the Apple ecosystem.
Where will we see an Apple WebRTC implementation?Safari on Mac OS X. The next official release of it.
The Safari browser on iPad and iPhone will come next. Appearing on iPhone 6 and onwards. Maybe iPhone 5, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
We will later see it supported in the iOS WebView support. Probably 9-12 months after the release of Safari on iOS.
The Apple TV would be left out of the WebRTC party. So will the Apple Watch.
Which Codecs will Apple be using?H.264, AAC-ELD and G.711. Essentially, what they use in FaceTime with the addition of G.711 for interoperability.
Apple sets its sights on Google. They now hold Microsoft as best-friends with the Office releasing on iOS.
On one hand, going with ORTC would be great:
On the other hand, going with WebRTC might be better:
Being adventurous, I’d go for ORTC if I were Apple. Vindictiveness goes a long way in decision making.
ExtraOn launch day, I am sure that Bono will be available on stage with Tim Cook. They will promise a personal video call over WebRTC running in WebKit inside Safari to the first 10 people who stand in line in Australia to purchase the next iPhone.
And then again, I might be mistaken and tomorrow, WebRTC will be soft launched on the Mac. Just don’t build your strategy on it really happening.
Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.
The post Apple WebRTC Won’t Happen Soon appeared first on BlogGeek.me.
The team at ThinQ show how to set up your routing profile, carrier selection, high volume traffic management, and LCR routing.
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Dramatically plagiarize visionary internal or "organic" sources via process-centric. Compellingly exploit worldwide communities for high standards in growth strategies.
Wow, this most certainly is a great a theme.
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